to finish a marathon in under two hours<\/a>, racing the London marathon in 1:59:30 and 1:59:41. Sawe trained in the Endurance Suit and seemed committed to wearing it for the race. It wasn\u2019t until he was spotted at the starting line in a plain white singlet and black shorts that Jacobson learned he had decided against it.<\/p>\n\u201cI guess today\u2019s not the day,\u201d he remembered saying to himself.<\/p>\n
But Kejelcha did opt for the suit.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to use the suit in training as soon I saw it for the first time,\u201d he said. \u201cI feel the hip and back support, and I wanted to use in competition, so I did it. It\u2019s a special one for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
And while it\u2019s impossible to measure precisely what impact it had on his performance, the estimated 1 percent improvement would be the difference between his 1:59:41 and 2:01:00. In other words, it\u2019s possible that the Endurance Suit was the edge that got Kejelcha over the finish line in just under the historic two-hour mark.<\/p>\n
Apparel designers have long understood that sportswear for runners has a great deal of room for improvement. In the late 1980s, the director of Nike\u2019s sports research lab, Martyn Shorten, developed a concept that came to be called \u201czoned aerodynamics,\u201d which concluded that runners could benefit from a full body \u201cspeed suit\u201d constructed of different materials for each body segment, reflecting the different airflow and drag each produced while in motion. But the technology necessary to implement this idea didn\u2019t exist, so the concept was shelved until 1999, when Nike was preparing for the Olympic Games in Sydney.<\/p>\n
It was at the Sydney Games that Nike unveiled the Swift Suit, a hooded, one-piece suit coated in polyurethane, that the Australian sprinter Cathy Freeman wore to win gold in the 400-meter run. Bright green and streamlined, the Swift Suit looked like something an astronaut or a superhero might wear, but the purpose was mechanical rather than aesthetic. \u201cThe fundamental premise is that skin is slow,\u201d said Jorge Carbo, a former researcher at Nike who worked in aerodynamics. \u201cIf you cover the skin with the right textures, you\u2019re going to get a better improvement.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite Freeman\u2019s winning result, the Swift Suit failed to catch on \u2014 partly because runners disliked the constrictive feeling, and partly because the measurable impacts were minimal. <\/p>\n
The discoveries soon made their way into other, faster sports, including cycling and speedskating, where Swift Suit-style apparel using zoned aerodynamic principles became the norm. \u201cIt worked fantastic for speedskating,\u201d said Len Brownlie, a sports aerodynamics consultant for Nike. \u201cAt the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, the men who were wearing the Swift skin won all the gold medals. It really did work. I think it changed the sport.\u201d<\/p>\n
In running, Nike shifted its focus toward alternative means of providing aerodynamic support. \u201cNobody doing a two-hour marathon wanted to wear a full-body suit,\u201d Carbo said. \u201cSo we started asking ourselves how else we could get those textures to the skin.\u201d They developed a kind of aerodynamic tape called AeroSwift, which could be attached to the arms and legs in thin strips, and built half-length tights with aerodynamic nodules running along the thighs.<\/p>\n
When Eliud Kipchoge tried to break the two-hour marathon barrier in 2017 at the Nike Breaking 2 event in Monza, Italy, he ran wearing the AeroSwift tape and the half-length tights, which Jacobson, at Adidas, said was a breakthrough. \u201cBefore Eliud ran Breaking 2, we were trying to get our marathon athletes to wear half tights, and they wouldn\u2019t go near them,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was a split short or nothing. But as soon as Kipchoge almost broke two hours, and did it in the tights, the runners were like, \u2018OK, maybe there\u2019s something here.\u2019 Without Kipchoge doing that, a full body suit in a marathon \u2014 completely forget about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Breaking 2 event, though unsuccessful, was motivating for Adidas, Jacobson said. It drove his team to look for other performance-boosting opportunities in apparel beyond aerodynamics, including cooling, airflow and a more sophisticated kind of structural support. Several years ago, they developed a graded compression tight that would help blood flow in the leg to stave off the effects of fatigue, but the project was pricey, owing to expensive woven materials sourced from Italian suppliers. Jacobson said that while he learned a lot from the project, it \u201cdidn\u2019t hit the mark.\u201d<\/p>\n
About four years ago, Jessica G. Hunter, a manager of athlete performance at Adidas, started looking into the effect of \u201cstiffening elements\u201d in suits for endurance runners. There was skepticism within the company that clothing could make much of a difference in a marathon. \u201cLeadership didn\u2019t think we would be able to improve running economy with apparel,\u201d Hunter said. \u201cBecause nobody had ever done it successfully before.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hunter found that the stabilizing elements made runners faster for longer. \u201cWhat we were trying to do was exploit the connection between the muscles that stabilize the pelvis and trunk and the muscles that stabilize the hip, and how those muscles tend to work together from a pelvic and hip stability,\u201d she said. \u201cIn order to do that, you have to have something that crosses the whole body. And the only way to do that is with a full, connected suit.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her work was handed off to Jacobson\u2019s team in Germany, where they fine-tuned the stiffening elements \u2014 laser-cut bands of TPU \u2014 to find \u201cthe sweet spot of science and performance with what is comfortable to wear,\u201d Jacobson said.<\/p>\n
The completed Techfit Endurance Suit, Jacobson said, \u201ccorrects and enhances\u201d an athlete\u2019s form in a race. It functions not unlike the high-tech LZR Racer, built by Speedo in the late 2000s, which reinforced a swimmer\u2019s abdomen muscles to keep them more horizontal in the water.<\/p>\n
The LZR Racer was so effective that it was banned from competition almost as soon as it was introduced \u2014 though not before dozens of world records were set in the suits. But while the dawn of performance-enhancing \u201csuper shoes\u201d in the late 2010s provoked World Athletics to impose new regulations, banning shoes over 40 millimeters in height and with more than one carbon fiber plate, there are currently no rules in marathon running specific to apparel. These \u201csuper suits,\u201d however beneficial to runners, are entirely unregulated, perhaps in part because so few top runners have embraced them.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were hoping to make a suit that was disruptive enough that people would freak out about apparel like they started freaking out about the shoes,\u201d Hunter said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo far it hasn\u2019t happened, which is a little disappointing,\u201d she said. \u201cIf Kejelcha hadn\u2019t come in second place, it might have been a bigger deal.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last summer, Patrick Jacobson, a senior apparel designer at Adidas, sent a team of emissaries to Kenya to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23744,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21254],"tags":[21290,25324,25326,25322,25325,25323,4526,25328,25327,25321],"class_list":["post-23743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-adidas","tag-adidas","tag-adidas-ag","tag-eliud","tag-fashion-and-apparel","tag-kipchoge","tag-marathon-running","tag-running","tag-sabastian-1995","tag-sawe","tag-sporting-goods-and-equipment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}